This I Believe

Have you ever had something bad happen to you but then it came back to help you in the end? This goes to show that everything happens for a reason, and you just need to go find why it happened.

There was a basketball tournament I had. Our team was being beaten by a team that was clearly better than us. We had started to put a few points together, but then our best player got hurt and had to leave the game. He was not able to play in the rest of the tournament. Everyone on our team was surprised and now we were really nervous. How were we supposed to play without our leader? We ended up losing that game by 20 points.

In the next game, we played an even better team. We thought that we had no chance against the team. The players were all bigger, stronger, faster, and overall better basketball players than us. We went down by 26 to start the game, but then we started working together and we only lost by 20 points again.

In the last game of the tournament, we were feeling more confident. Both of those teams we played were much better than us, but the team we were going to play was more even with us. We still did not have our best player, but that did not matter. They were still bigger than us, but we were able to hustle more than them, and we were more skilled. A lot of different players on our team stepped up and had really good games. They were forced to because we now had to rely on ourselves instead of just letting our best player run everything. We all got a lot better because we had to do more to help the team.

This injury to our best player ended up being a blessing in disguise because our team got better because we had to take on bigger roles and do more. This means that when our best player gets back, we will be even better because we got more experience. We did not win this tournament, but because of what happened, we have a better chance to win the next one.

This experience was not the first like this to happen me, but it cemented my belief that everything happens for a reason. As far as I am concerned, this is a universal truth.

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This week’s essay

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.